Event hosted by “Super UW,” a revolutionary student organization that promotes Hamas, jihad, and anti-Zionism, in October 2023. Photo: Chin Hei Leung / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Support for Israel in the United States is in part a battle of narratives. Pro-Israel advocates emphasize democracy, pluralism, and Israel’s role as a refuge for a historically persecuted people. Critics frame Zionism – now seen as a placeholder for Israel’s national mission – as an instrument of colonialism, racism, apartheid, and most recently genocide. The assumption is straightforward: whichever of these dueling narratives proves more persuasive will shape public opinion.

But social science suggests something quite troubling about this communications contest.

Positive views of Zionism do not necessarily cancel out negative ones. And when it comes to shaping attitudes toward Israel, the negative views appear to matter far more.

That insight helps explain a striking shift now underway in American public opinion. Support for Israel has been declining for years, but recently that erosion has accelerated. For the first time in decades, polling shows that more Americans now sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

The change is especially pronounced among younger Americans. Older Americans remain far more supportive of Israel, suggesting that generational replacement may further weaken Israel’s standing in the years ahead. Religiosity also matters: religious Americans are significantly more supportive of Israel than secular ones. Partisan divisions remain substantial as well, though the gap between more pro-Israel Republicans and more pro-Palestinian Democrats has narrowed in recent years.

These demographic patterns help explain why Israel’s standing in American public opinion appears increasingly fragile.

The deeper story lies not simply in declining positive sentiment toward Israel, but in the growing political power of negative narratives about Zionism itself.

To explore this question, I analyzed data from the Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll, a nationally representative survey of more than 3,400 Americans with an oversample of younger adults. Respondents were asked how they define the word “Zionism.” Some interpreted the term in broadly positive ways, associating it with Jewish self-determination in the Jewish ancestral homeland, with support for Israel’s continued existence, or with the belief that Jews have the same right to national sovereignty as other peoples.

Other respondents defined the term in negative ways. For them, Zionism means expelling Palestinians, creating a system in which Jews have more rights than others, and/or maintaining a form of racism or apartheid.

At first glance, these definitions might appear to represent opposite ends of a single ideological spectrum. One might expect that people who strongly endorse positive understandings of Zionism would reject the negative ones. But that is not what the data show.

Instead, the two orientations operate largely independently. The statistical relationship between the positive and negative interpretations of Zionism is extremely small, with a correlation of only 0.09. In practical terms, this means that knowing someone sees Zionism as a legitimate movement for Jewish self-determination tells us almost nothing about whether that same person also associates Zionism with racism or oppression.

Many Americans appear to hold both ideas – “good Zionism” and “bad Zionism” – simultaneously. A respondent may accept Israel’s legitimacy as a state while also believing that Zionism represents an unjust political project. Positive and negative images of Zionism coexist within the same public imagination rather than canceling one another out.

The political consequences of these views are striking.

Positive understandings of Zionism turn out to be surprisingly weak predictors of support for Israel. Among respondents who strongly endorsed positive definitions of Zionism, roughly one in five still opposed Israel existing as a Jewish state or even existing at all. Meanwhile, among those who rejected the positive definitions entirely, about a quarter expressed opposition to Israel as a Jewish state. The difference between these groups is modest.

A similar pattern appears when respondents are asked about American military aid to Israel. Among those with strong positive views of Zionism, more than a third still favored reducing or ending American assistance. Among respondents who rejected the positive definitions entirely, the number rises only slightly.

In other words, positive images of Zionism do not strongly predict support for Israel’s existence or for continued American aid.

Negative interpretations of Zionism tell a very different story.

Respondents who rejected the negative claims about Zionism were overwhelmingly supportive of Israel’s existence. Only about one and a half percent of them believed Israel should not exist at all. But among respondents who endorsed two or three of the negative definitions, opposition to Israel’s existence is widespread. Nearly one in five believed Israel should not exist, and a majority rejected Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

The pattern is even more dramatic when it comes to military assistance. Among respondents who rejected the negative definitions of Zionism, only fourteen percent supported ending American aid. Among those who embraced two-three negative interpretations, nearly two-thirds favored ending assistance.

The conclusion is difficult to escape. Positive associations with Zionism do relatively little to generate political support for Israel. Negative associations, by contrast, strongly predict opposition to Israel’s existence and to US support.

Political science helps explain why this pattern emerges. For decades, scholars studying public opinion have documented the disproportionate power of negative information. Research by Stanford political scientist Shanto Iyengar and others has shown that negative political messages tend to be more memorable, more emotionally potent, and more influential in shaping attitudes than positive ones. Negative cues capture attention more effectively and linger longer in memory.

This dynamic is familiar in electoral politics. Negative campaign advertisements often shape voter perceptions more strongly than positive ones. Political identities increasingly form not just around what people support but around what they oppose.

Scholars describe this phenomenon as affective polarization: politics organized around resentment, hostility, and moral condemnation of opposing groups. Once negative narratives take hold, they become extremely difficult to dislodge.

Something similar appears to be happening in contemporary discussions of Zionism.

For many Americans, especially younger ones, the word “Zionism” is no longer encountered primarily through historical discussions of Jewish national revival or through the story of Israel’s founding after the Holocaust. Instead, it increasingly appears within a moralized political vocabulary that portrays Zionism as colonialism, racism, or apartheid.

And events in the region play an important role, as does the messages emanating from Israel’s elected leadership. From 1948 to 1973, Israel successfully fought four wars for its very existence against enemies seen as undemocratic and “other” in the US. In 1987, Israel has been in frequent violent conflict with Palestinians.

Moreover, while in the 1990s Israel was a true partner in what would become a failed peace process, its current (and recent) leadership acts and talks as if its policy focus is to expand and secure permanent control over all the land west of the Jordan River.

The resulting negative narratives circulate widely on social media, in activist movements, and on university campuses. Once absorbed, they shape how people interpret everything else they hear about Israel.

If someone believes that Zionism itself is inherently racist, then evidence of Israel’s democratic institutions or technological achievements will not necessarily change their mind. Those positive facts become secondary to the underlying moral judgment.

The negative frame does the real political work. And it is this insight carries important implications for those concerned about Israel’s future in American public life.

For decades, pro-Israel advocacy has emphasized Israel’s accomplishments: its vibrant democracy, its economic dynamism, its thriving civil society, and its alliance with the United States. Those arguments remain important. But the evidence suggests they are unlikely to be sufficient if negative moral narratives about Zionism continue to spread.

If Americans increasingly associate Zionism itself with racism or colonial domination, then simply highlighting Israel’s achievements will not reverse declining support. The deeper question – whether Jewish self-determination itself is legitimate – will remain unresolved.

The central task today, therefore, is not merely promoting positive images of Israel but confronting directly the narratives that portray Zionism as morally illegitimate.

Those narratives have a long history. Versions of them circulated widely during the Cold War, when the Soviet bloc promoted the infamous 1975 United Nations Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is racism.” Although that resolution was eventually repealed in 1991, the idea it popularized never fully disappeared.

Today, elements of that narrative appear to have taken root among a new generation of Americans.

The Yale Youth Poll data suggests that this shift is not merely rhetorical. Negative interpretations of Zionism are closely associated with concrete political attitudes, including opposition to Israel’s existence and support for ending American aid.

In other words, the delegitimization of Zionism is not simply a cultural development. It is a political one.

For those concerned about Israel’s long-term standing in the United States, the lesson is sobering but clear. Positive stories about Israel matter, but they will not reverse declining support if the negative moral narratives surrounding Zionism remain unanswered.

Before Israel can be defended as a democracy, an ally, or a refuge, the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination itself must be defended.

And in politics, as decades of research on negative messaging remind us, the most powerful narratives are often the ones that go unanswered.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.